Talk:The Six Million Dollar Man (comics)
Organization Good job on the clarification between magazine and comic. But do we really need a comics disamig page? The only true comic was the comic -- that's a unique classification (changing it to "comic book" wasn't even necessary but I can live with it). All the others are just illustrated stories that were packaged with -- or sections of -- other merchandise. Unless we can find a comic book from another country, I think we can lose the disambig page. — Paul (talk) 23:48, 19 November 2007 (UTC) :Excellent finds on the Spanish comics! So The Six Million Dollar Man (comics) is a keeper. And the Look-in stuff is shaping up nicely. But categorization and disambigs still need some work. I maintain that there is a clear distinction between comic books and other illustrated stories such as picture-strips and those found in the official magazines, annuals, and read-alongs. We should represent that distinction on the wiki. To that end, I propose the following: :*First, all true comics and disambig pages for same should be tagged into Category:Comics. :*As conceded above, The Six Million Dollar Man (comics) should remain as the disambig page for all true comics. :*We should streamline the names of the comics (e.g. El Hombre Nuclear (Colombia), El Hombre Nuclear (Argentina)). :*The Six Million Dollar Man (comic book) should remain focused on the Charlton comic. I'd feel better about simplifying this to the singular "(comic)" but I understand the need for a visual distinction from the plural. :*All other illustrated stories and picture-strips should be tagged into Category:Illustrated Stories and fall under The Six Million Dollar Man (illustrated) disambig page. :*Illustrated stories should have streamlined names also; The Six Million Dollar Man (Look-in) and The Six Million Dollar Man (Annual), etc. :Again, the content edits are great, but I'd like to activate these organizational changes. — Paul (talk) 19:30, 20 November 2007 (UTC) ::Sorry for the delay in replying; I just happened to see you'd left messages here a few minutes ago. Thanks for the kind words of encouragement :) ::I'm not quite sure if your comments were put up before my explanatory notes on the Category:Comics page, so here are my thoughts as to why I've progressed, administratively, as I have. The term "comics", in its broadest sense, refers to all sequential art. Peanuts is just as much a "true comic" as The Legion of Super-Heroes. In fact, comic strips were being called comics at least a couple of decades before American comic books came into being. Several languages, including French, use the literally-translated "comic strips" to refer to books and strips. ::An illustrated story is quite different from a comic in that it is dominantly text, and the illustrations don't progress the story (they aren't sequential). Thus, The Six Million Dollar Man (comic book) can be properly said to contain comics and illustrated stories. ::Until evidence can be found of a book that it is dominantly formatted in the way of those stories at the back of the SMDM and BW comic books, I don't think we've got cause for such a category. The only thing I can think of at present that might fit that description are the British annuals, but they're such a unique form of their own that I think Category:British annuals is more appropriate. ::As for streamlining, I'm somewhat on the fence. Certainly, I thought of just doing something like El Hombre Nuclear (Argentina), but the problem is that this actually might not be specific enough. There may come a day when someone wants to write about the Argentinian release of the series itself, or maybe a related novel. Honestly, I'm not an expert in Spanish-language variations on the series. However, I do have enough experience with dubbing to know that regionalization can result in massive differences of content. For instance, Wayne's World II (Czech subtitles) is a wholly different experience than Wayne's World II (Czech soundtrack). And the regional differences between The Pretenders in the UK, Germany, France and Italy alone have formed the basis for several graduate level theses. They are substantively not the same product. Now, is any of this going on with SMDM? Is there a difference between what the Argentinians, Mexicans and Columbians saw? I dunno, but I'd be willing to bet that there's at least a difference between Mexico and South America. So I think that if you keep the longer name of (Argentinian comic book), you avoid problems in the future. ::Besides with the disambig page being as clear as it is now, and with the low probability of actually linking to the page in any other article, it's not really doing much harm for it to be long. ::The change from SMDM (comics) to SMDM (comic book) wasn't one from plural to singular. Like bionics, comics is singular and plural. (Roll your eyes at the pedantry: technically, it's a comics book.) For the moment I'm tempted to agree that it should remain the name of the Charlton publication, simply on the basis that English is the language of first publication of these properties. However, time could change this, especially with respect to The Bionic Woman comic. Should the new series prove long-lived, you'll likely see IDW or someone swooping in to do the comic adaptation and then you're going to need something a little more than a definite article to separate the two titles. My only thought of how this might change in the future is that, one day, we might call it The Bionic Woman (Charlton comic book) and a hypothetical future book Bionic Woman (InsertPublisherHere comic book). Course, you might well argue that anything based on the 2007 series shouldn't even be on this wiki. ::Anyway, my general philogophy has simply been that I don't know enough about all the products out there to boldly proclaim simple names for stuff. I've tended to err on the side of precise, if longer, names that won't likely be displaced by a future discovery. CzechOut ☎ | 03:53, 21 November 2007 (UTC) :::I've taken the liberty of renaming this thread, Organization because that's what we're really getting at. I've also integrated your response into proper Tallk page format -- I'm not lazy. :) I must say, you present a good argument for maintaining the longer, more specific titles -- I'm convinced! Let's keep it. :::However, I'm not sold on keeping all "sequential art" under "comics." Historic value aside, if we were to poll 100 people right now and ask them which of the two (Legion of Super-Heroes or Peanuts) is a comic book and which is a comic strip, well, I think you can guess the results. Even Look-in uses the term picture-strip when referring to their Steve and Jaime stories. I just think a contemporary approach is better when dealing with pop cultural stuff. :::On the other hand, if I were to consider a compromise and agree to keep a global "(comics)," I might ask that we at least use sub-headers to differentiate between "illustrated stories" (like those at the back of the Charlton comics), "picture-strips" (like those found in Look-in and Annuals), and "comic books" etc. What would you say to that, Bob? -- (Can I call you "Bob?" It's a better than being so formal and calling you CzechOut is a very cool handle, by-the-way, and I'm not asking you to change it. Content-specific wikis really do benefit from a sense of community. And knowing names goes a long way in fostering that. ;) — Paul (talk) 17:38, 21 November 2007 (UTC) ::::Thanks for keeping me not so lazy :):) I think perhaps my discussion of etymology obscured my point. The question isn't whether (American English speakers) can differentiate between a comic book and a comic strip — of course your hypothetical poll would produce the results you predict — but whether the term "comics" is broad enough to apply to all English speakers. There's certainly contemporary evidence to back that up. First and foremost, check out wikipedia:Comics. That article puts both types under the heading. (All comic books are comics; not all comics are comic books.) It's also revalatory, to me, that wikipedia:comic book and wikipedia:American comic book point to two, wholly different pages. As in so many other cases, Americans are weird. Wonderfully, so, of course. But still they tend to have a different view of words. (See also: cinema, saloon, etc.) Luckily, I have no intention of trying to write an article on Look-in or TELEjunior themselves; my head literally would explode trying to find a fully acceptable term for them. ::::But more than that, virtually every newspaper in America includes a "comics" section. I've never seen it labelled in the index as "comic strips", though I imagine there might be a few papers that do. Here are some online references of well-established news sites around the web that also put strips under the heading "comics": Salon.com, CNN, [http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/comicsgames/ New York Post]. There are also a number of contemporary reference works which call comic strips "comics", including notably [http://www.paulgravett.com/books/gbc/gbc.htm Great British Comics, a guide to strips in pubications like Look-in]. As you click through the links, you can't help but walk away with the impression that in both British and American contemporary use, comics describes strips as well as being the plural of "comic book". ::::"Picture strip" is a quite vague term that really would be problematic to introduce into this wiki. It can have a lot of meanings, depending on which side of the Atlantic one is on. It can be a synonym for "comic strip", but it also can be quite literally a strip of photographs with word balloons an narration boxes like a comic strip. It can imply a total lack of drawn art. ::::I did actually think of dividing the disambig page further, along the lines you suggest. But that seemed to make things unnecessarily complicated. It's basically down to a question of whether it should be divided by content or format. Is it more useful to group according to whether it's an illustrated story, a strip, or a book — or by whether it's an exclusively Steve affair or a Steve and Jaime work? At the end of the day, I thought it best to divide by the stars of the work, and then to provide enough explanatory info after the entry to usefully define it for a user. Look at the smaller Steve and Jaime section. If you went to further subdivide it, you'd have two subsections, one for Strips and one for Books — each (currently) having just one entry. It seemed too much clutter for me, given that the explanatory note conveyed the same information. ::::The other thing to consider is that I don't actually have a copy of the foreign language material. Especially as we get into really off the wall stuff (today I found comic material from Korea and the UAE), the articles will likely grow shorter and shorter — basically just confirming that the work exists. These articles will likely be started as InsertForeignTitleHere (InsertCountryHere comic), because I don't think I can say for certain that they are a "book". Ultimately, someone somewhere might be able to help us out, but in the meantime, if you want to subdivide this thing further, I think the more useful thing might be country (or world region) or origin. ::::Either way, I'd say just let the comics section breathe for a bit. Let's get a few more examples in there and then reassess the situation in, say, 30 days. ::::Oh, and I dig your "community building" spirit, but, really, it's not necessary to reveal my RL name on a public part of the internet to do that. The whole point of fun login names, to me, is not just that they can convey an aspect of your personality, but also that they afford a modicum of protection. Surely you've seen enough of the OSI in action to appreciate the need for at least minimal security. Oh, wait, they told a new, completely random person about bionics every damned episode. Nevermind . . . CzechOut ☎ | 06:07, 22 November 2007 (UTC) :::::I'm not entirely convinced with this naming strategy, but I like the way these sections are shaping up, and they seem to be working well in my keyword search tests. I'm inclind to give them the breathing room you suggest. That may be a biased move on my part, but I'm really impressed with the volume and substance of your contributions. They're detailed and articulate -- sometimes a bit word-heavy -- but you're able to maintain the focus of each article, which is important. Good job! — Paul (talk) 16:32, 24 November 2007 (UTC)